It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.

My experience in France was that there were a lot more intellectual/rational analyses occurring. I’m not sure that in the United States there has ever been a time rational arguments were in the mainstream of discourse.

Professor X blames this state of affairs [students who wouldn’t voluntarily read a book] on what he calls “postmodern modes of thought,” and on the fact that there are more women teaching in college, which has had “a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought.”

I don’t really even know what he’s talking about, except obviously women teaching is in some vague way bad.

But I think there is an inherent value in a liberal arts education, and he does not. He thinks it should be reserved for the elite. I think if it was reserved for the elite, he wouldn’t have let me in.